Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter One

Soon Neetra was gone from the material world too. Leaving her corporeal body asleep in Joe’s arms, our heroine slid onto the astral plane and parted from the group at the castle gate, to soar up the hillside and plunge into the expanding ball of temporo-psionic flux. Locating Steam’s presence gave Neetra no difficulties, and on entering it she found herself engulfed in the whirlwind of thoughts common on the periphery of a consciousness. Speeding by her, flashing and merging and blending were snippets of herself, Steam, The Four Heroes, the Next Four and numerous others, including the dark-browed winged girl Neetra had identified as her friend Carrie. However, she knew these fleeting recollections and impressions were no more than the remotest distant satellites of Steam’s true psyche, and when she searched for that, she found it disturbingly absent. She would never have known it was Steam’s mind she was in, so far from her he was. He had ventured deep, deep down into this stygian pit of time and memory.

Our heroine pressed on, negotiating the many concentric strata of Steam’s innermost, flying into territory that lesser psychics could never hope to gain. Presently the ephemera were behind her and she was in denser, darker realms, harder to traverse, where the visual images were fewer and so complex she could not understand them all. Still though, nothing of the real Steam disclosed itself. Neetra began to fear the one she sought had delved too far, and wherever he was now, it was a place even her considerable powers could not take her.

Suddenly, the girl sensed someone. It was not he who Neetra had journeyed here to find – indeed, as the figure swam into focus through the thick telepathic murk, our heroine could safely say it was the very last person she had expected to see. Another girl, around her own age, and clothed in the simple pinafore dress of more than a century ago which she had combined with extremely colourful socks. She looked back at our heroine and smiled a misty, wise, happy smile.

“Jiang Jiang?” Neetra gawped.

The two girls faced each other across a backdrop of impenetrable void. Neetra had met Jiang Jiang only once and knew her as the child of Professor Ling Ling Mao, co-founder of a group called The Wandering Dragon that had done similar work to The Four Heroes during the third Dark Advent. It had been a short but significant encounter, for at that time Neetra first learned of The Prophecy of the Flame and took her one read of its enigmatic pages. She was also aware that Jiang Jiang herself was a major part of what that book foretold, as heiress to some awesome latent power not even the Professor fully understood. None of which explained what Jiang Jiang was doing here, nestled in the untravelled demesnes of Steam’s brain.

“You think in Chinese,” Jiang Jiang said to Neetra, by way of welcome. “It’s so nice we can converse in our first language while we’re here, without all that psychic translation getting in the way! And I see too a large part of your astral self is still called Li, not Neetra. I hardly know which one to call you. Back in the old days you and The Four Heroes used to change and modify and revise your identities all the time – it’s only when we’re older we find it was never as easily done as it seemed! I grew older once. It was odd.”

This version of Jiang Jiang certainly talked in the way Neetra remembered. “How can you be here?” our heroine cried, thinking it best to start with the first of her thousand questions. “This would make a bit more sense – a bit – if you were just an image of Jiang Jiang that Steam’s thinking about. But…”

Neetra focused her powers on the girl for a moment, confirming the truth they were already telling her.

“No,” she went on softly, “you’re way more than a psychic projection, aren’t you?”

“Oh, there’s a very real part of me inside Steam,” Jiang Jiang announced, speaking as if this was an elementary fact that Neetra should have already known. “You were there when I found that out for myself! It was also the moment you and I met.”

“I remember…the last part, at least,” Neetra began, looking deeply at her strange companion. “And yes, you’re right, the moment I walked through that library door with the girls and Steam you stared at him for about a minute without speaking. Then you said, ‘How interesting,’ didn’t you?”

“Well, it was!” Jiang Jiang declared sunnily. “Seeing Steam for the first time cleared up all sorts of mysteries I’d been wondering about!”

“I’ve a feeling you could do the same for me, on a grand scale, if we only had time,” Neetra said. “But Jiang Jiang, this is an emergency. The Nottingham of my era’s in big trouble, and I need to find Steam.”

Jiang Jiang’s eyebrows raised almost imperceptibly. “Steam’s retreated as far as he can go,” said she. “He used something, like time and not like time, to do it. He’s gone all the way to the core. There’s somewhere you’d have to travel past first, if you wanted to get to him.”

“Retreated,” Neetra said again, thinking. “Because the world outside became too painful?”

Jiang Jiang’s wordless, benign smile provided a satisfactory answer in the affirmative. Neetra sighed.

“I don’t like it when Gala’s even half-right, but I guess that means she was,” our heroine said with resignation. “Not that it makes a difference to what I have to do.”

Purposefully tugging the skirt of her psychic self into place, Neetra turned to the other girl. “Jiang Jiang, can you show me the way to him?” she asked.

Her companion beamed radiantly back.

“Of course I can!” she declared. “It would be my pleasure. I’m so glad to see you again!”

The two girls joined hands and took flight, Jiang Jiang striking out on the route she apparently knew. “Anyhow, we hybrids have to stick together!” she continued as they sailed along. “I’m one too, Chinese mother and Japanese father, did I ever tell you that?”

“You might have done, it’s hard to be sure with you,” Neetra replied. “But that’s in the Prophecy, isn’t it? ‘Hybrids have a certain power.’ Does that mean being a hybrid has something to do with power as in superhuman abilities, then?”

“It does for me,” said Jiang Jiang, “though with you it’s that remarkable cause you follow, rather than your mixed planetary lineage, that bestows upon you your special abilities. Moreover, I seriously doubt that line refers to your Four Heroes powers anyway. It’ll be something else. Ah!”

With that exclamation, the turgid indecipherability that surrounded them began to part like the fog it was. What lay beyond was a vista Neetra had seen earlier in the evening, via one of Steam’s thought-projections. It was a wild empty world, covered in snow and eerily devoid of people and landmarks, as if it had snowed in a desert. From the black sky above, a swirling silent blizzard held unrelenting sway. The two girls’ feet touched down lightly on the drifts of white.

“If we’re here, we’re close,” Jiang Jiang said. “What we’re seeing is the memory Steam carries nearest to his heart ­– and he has one, believe me, even if not in the biological sense. After this, there’s nowhere left but the heart itself.”

“And that’s where he is?” asked Neetra, trying to keep up. “Is that the deepest into himself Steam can go?”

“The deepest any of us can,” was the reply.

Someone was approaching. Through the sheets of snow a small figure made its way towards the pair of spectral girls, stumbling in the arduous conditions, seeming lost and uncertain what was going on. It was a lone boy, and though he was younger than even Jiang Jiang or Neetra, his emerald eyes and jet-black hair left the latter in no doubt as to who he was. The boy was Steam.

He was wearing nothing but blue-and-white striped pyjamas, and as Neetra stared, she saw that his bare feet were pink human ones no different to her own. The same was true of his hands, his neck, and the triangle of his chest that was showing. Neetra realised she was not only looking at Steam as a child, but also at a time before he acquired his mechanical body.

“He can’t see us. No-one here can,” Jiang Jiang advised her. “This isn’t the sort of memory that can be intruded on.”

As the boy-Steam looked around him in confusion and trepidation, a second form appeared in the lonely land. This figure too was one Neetra had already seen that day. It was the winged female, and now they were face-to-face at last, our heroine saw she had been in error about her identity. For though she shone with the innocence and unaffected beauty of a girl Carrie’s age, or one even younger, this childlike purity somehow sat enthroned alongside the grace and elegance of a stately grown woman. She was, indeed, taller than any of the other three present, and her diaphanous white wings were longer and fuller than Carrie’s. They looked light and fine as the snowflakes that billowed about them, and their dainty tips reached all the way to their owner’s heels. She was not Carrie. She was something far more than human. Even so, her golden hair, her face, her dark-browed eyes, and of course the wings, resembled those of Neetra’s friend too closely to be mere coincidence.

Within the memory, the boy-Steam was gazing at this newcomer with as much rapt attention as Neetra. “Who are you?” he breathed in awe, and his voice, though a child’s voice, was that of Steam.

“Through the ages your culture has preserved and recorded much of what they could discover about my people,” the beautiful creature replied. Her tones were the sweetest Neetra had ever heard, but in them she detected a strange lingering sadness too. “Search yourself. What do I look like to you?”

The boy appeared to know the answer, but was reluctant to speak it aloud. In his green eyes was a look of growing fear.

“It might help if you think back on what you can remember,” the winged one prompted.

For long seconds Steam’s younger self concentrated hard, as if it was a struggle for him to call to mind where he was and how he had found himself there.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” he said at last, speaking slowly. “We was driving home. It was night, and well snowy, and me dad had to go careful ’cause he said the roads were icy…”

“The roads were icy,” the other agreed solemnly.

Steam closed his eyes tight, trying to remember what had happened next. When he could not, he looked meekly up again at the shimmering stranger.

“Your people know of mine,” she said again. “You also know something of our nature. Your folklore and theology are not inaccurate when they term us guardians and guides, for when the time comes that one of you must leave your world and journey to ours. Put it all together. You know what I am.”

The boy-Steam’s face was white and terrified now. “Then…” he began, “if that’s what you are…does that mean I’m…?”

She looked lovingly down at him, and this time the sadness in her countenance and speech was plain to all.

“If only it were so simple,” said she.

END OF CHAPTER ONE